Monday, August 17, 2009

Baking!

We had a couple of parties to attend recently, one being a grillfest we threw, so I baked cupcakes and cookies. The first party was a watermelon themed party, and after seeing a few examples of watermelon cupcakes around, I had to make some! I only have one cupcake tin, and stupidly decided to make a full batch of cupcakes. I tried putting some on a cookie tin in the cupcake foils so I could cook more than six at a time, but that didn't work so well. It did, however, give me a good base for a larger watermelon cupcake cake in addition to the little watermelon cupcakes.

The food coloring is powdered not liquid here. Since I've never used powdered and couldn't read any instructions they gave due to the language barrier, I couldn't get very good colors from them. I was going for two greens, but wanted them both to be a bit darker than they came out. Not that big a deal, but somewhat disappointing. I also had a batch of vanilla cupcakes, but we're going to pretend it's because I was concerned about those who didn't like chocolate, not that I forgot to put in the food coloring and chocolate chips. I tried flour coating the chips so they didn't sink, and think that it worked for the first couple of batches. This one was from the last batch, and I think they sank because by that time, sitting around for 6 other batches to go in the oven for 20 minutes then cool so I could use the tin again, the flour got soaked through and they sank. Everyone liked them, and I'd make them again for summer parties.

I also baked cookies when I baked the cupcakes, thinking I'd make cupcakes for the watermelon party and cookies for our grilling party. Of course, with the full batch of cupcakes (I got 44), I needn't have bothered with the cookies too! These cookies are very delicious, soft, interesting sugar cookies that taste amazing with a frosting of 1/4 cup shortening, 2 cups powdered sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp almond, and enough milk to get whatever consistency you're going for, under 2 Tbsp. I ran out of almond after making the cupcake frosting and cookies, so bought some more, but a different brand this time. Upon opening the container, it smelled funny, but I wasn't thinking too well and poured it in anyway. We determined that the strange almond extract was not in fact almond, but coconut. It is labeled almond, but is certainly coconut. Coconut does not taste very good as a frosting for these cookies. I am still very much saddened by that, and am considering getting more almond to make more frosting to frost the rest because they are just that good with the frosting.